Americans Selecting The Cave - Losing International Perspective

Are Americans increasingly thinking that the best approach to life is to retreat from international affairs? A newspaper item about a recently released Pew Research Center poll provides some indication that a sizeable portion of the current generation (30 and under) is of the opinion that America should “mind its own business internationally” and leave others to their own interests, and that we “should go our own way” without consideration of other nations’ agreement.

While this boiled-down and grossly over-simplified assessment of American opinion regarding how the US should deal with other nations is a broad brush view, it is undoubtedly a telling perspective of how the latest generation sees our place and responsibilities in the world. This generation has grown up in an era where the highly media-covered American efforts and actions abroad have for the most part been very unsuccessful. We get engaged in wars and conflicts that we can quickly bring to a military end, but are then unable to extract ourselves from ever extending follow-on situations where success not only evades us, but we begin to lose ground on the very victory that we thought we had attained. I am not just speaking of the wars in Iran and Afghanistan, but the general conflicts throughout the Middle-East, Africa and Southeast Asia. We have tried and failed to win our wars on Poverty, on Drugs, and on Crime. The current generation has lost ground in education, health care, job security and earning potential relative to the previous generation. And as a nation we are more dependent on foreign entities for oil & other resources, consumer and business goods, and economic stability (foreign investment). We are the greatest nation in the world, a true super-power that is suffering from a debilitating degenerative disease that is sapping our strength and will.

So given all these troubles and astonishing lack of successes, it is no wonder that people are starting to think that America could solve most of its problems if we stayed out of international affairs to the greatest extent possible and if we focused on going it alone doing it our way. This may be an attractive and easily understood approach to want to pursue; but it neither will nor could work out for us. It violates the basic reality that we do not live in an isolatable system.

First to be left alone and to leave others alone requires that the ‘others’ agree to allow you to be left alone. Now while this ‘just leave me alone’ approach has always worked out extremely well for everyone who previously used it, like the Aztecs, the native American Indians, the opening of Japan to the West in 1853, the Roman Empire to the Mongal horde just to mention a few. When someone else has an interest in what they view you as having, they rarely just leave you alone.

Next, the very greatness of America to a large extent is derived from the fact that people came to America to make a better life for themselves. They came to a place where the ‘rules that everyone lived by’ were not rigid and age-old traditions that you could not violate. People found new and better ways to do things and America prospered. We kept taking the next step, seizing the opportunities, enriching ourselves from our creativity, and opening doors that others did not even see as doors. To choose to close ourselves off from the ‘outside’ only limits our access to more opportunities to advance and prosper.

And then there is the most important reason of all to live in the real world. America was created and grew from a spirit that looked outward, that sought the distant horizon, and that truly reached for the stars. Shrinking back from what is hard and difficult, what everyone thinks cannot be done is not the American way. We may have lost focus and have gotten lazy, but to live we must choose to move forward or we accept that we are not the future and let other overtake us. Either we believe in ourselves and our affirmation that freedom and democracy are the only way that we will live; or we crawl away to our caves and leave the world to the fitter survivors to come. You can hide and die, or do and live. It’s your choice.